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/fSSOCIATION OF THE 13 A F^ OF T|HE eiTY 
OF JVJEW YOf^K, 

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14th, 1886, 

BY '1' o i i " « 

WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER... . .■• 



Printed from the Memorial Book of the Association. 






In MjiQU- 




PUPLlCATt. 



EXCHAf^l^^U, 



Metttortat* 



IN presenting, at the request of the Executive Committee, 
a memorial of the life and character of our deceased fel- 
low member, Samuel J. Tildet^, I recognize the propri- 
ety and necessity of the rule of our body which limits these 
commemorative sketches to a few pages of the Memorial 
Book. This requirement must be observed in the present 
instance, notwithstanding the wide field which might other- 
wise be occupied in the survey of a character and career of 
unusual importance in their relations to State and National 
affairs, aside from the special interest which attaches to 
them for us in view of the professional life of Mr. Tilden, 
the part taken by him in forming this Association, and the 
remarkable way in which, in a great public emergency, he 
aided in giving practical effect to the main pui-poses of its 
organization. 

In the briefest retrospect of the life of Mr. Tilden we are 
arrested by certain sharp and striking contrasts which in 
his case, as in that of many men of mark, seem to come into 
prominence only when the whole life is looked at across the 
interval by which Death separates it from the current inter- 
ests and intercourse of men. 

With him the sovereign element of self-reliance, the main- 
spring of the largest success, w^as hampered by physical ail- 
ments which deprived him of the benefit of a completed 
academic course of study, and which often interfered with 
his capacity for active service, yet his years of life, from 
his birth on February 4, 1814, to his death on August 14, 



1886, outran the prescribed limit, were crowded with the 
most varied labors, and were never clouded by any abate- 
ment of intellectual vigor. Beginning life with scanty 
means, and for many years contenting himself with the 
simplest arrangements for his personal comfort and con- 
venience, he came to possess, as the result of his sagacity 
and financial skill, the amplest means for the gratification 
of the cultivated tastes and the love of Nature exhibited so 
liberally both in his city and his country homes. As a 
lawyer, never identified with the general practice of the 
profession, or seeking a large clientage, he became a master 
of the law as a science and an acknowledged authority in one 
of its branches most closely allied \\ith the main sources of 
our national prosperity. Without special forensic ability, 
he gained, in conspicuous cases, signal victories at the Bar. 
Without any gift of oratory or of what, for want of better 
words, we call personal magnetism, he came to be the 
acknowledged head of a great party ; the Chief Executive 
of his native State ; the recipient of a majority of the popu- 
lar vote for the Presidency, and, according to the final 
arbitrament of the Electoral Commission, of 184 against 185 
votes in the Electoral Colleges ; and in his voluntary retire- 
ment he retained to the end of his life a potent influence in 
public affairs. 

The lights and shadows which belong to this many-sided 
life must not tempt us from the view, to which we are con- 
fined, of that part of Mr. Tilden's career, which belongs 
more closely to our own professional sphere. And yet his 
activities as a lawyer and as a public man, were in an unusual 
degree coincident, and it was his legal training which quali- 
fied him for the best discharge of civic trusts. He was 
always an intensely interested actor in public affairs ; always 
a power in the political party into which he was born and 
in which he was nurtured. He had a natural bent and zest 
for politics as one of the great factors in human affairs and 
human progress. His native fondness for study, quickened 
by intercourse with superior minds, and turned, by the cir- 



cumstances which interrupted his college course, into the 
channel of secluded thought and individual research, seized 
upon history, the course of political opinion, the problems 
of government, and the great economic questions which 
they involve, and he was always a serious, careful and 
laborious student in these fields. To him " the years which 
bring the philosophic mind ' ' came very early. In my ac- 
quaintance with him, dating from my boyhood and con- 
tinuing through the friendship of nearly half a century, I 
found him unchanged, from first to last, in this absorbing 
interest in public affairs, specially directed to their right 
administration, according to the ideas which were, to him, 
the true embodiment of the principles of good government. 
He brought the same rare capacity and gift of patient 
search and exploration to bear on every subject which en- 
gaged his attention. If in his reading, which he pursued 
with avidity, he took up as a special topic of study some 
period of history, such as the English Revolution, he would 
embrace in his investigation whatever was necessary to the 
complete mastery of the subject, however wide the range of 
research it involved, pursuing the favorite topic wdthout 
regard to time, or rest, or thought of other things. 

The same habit he brought into his private affairs, his pro- 
fessional work and his political activities. Alike to all ob- 
jects which engrossed him he gave the whole of his intel- 
lectual capacity, all the energy of his will and the full 
measure of his physical strength. He had a persistence 
which was more than perseverance and a faculty of adhe- 
sion to the main purpose in view, and of reaching it by dis- 
cussion, by investigation, and by all means of possible 
solution, which exhausted the powers and the patience of 
everyone but himself. Under none of the limitations which 
the domestic relations impose, with more or less stiingency 
upon even the busiest men, this concentrated absorption 
became his fixed habit, and was largely at once the method 
and the means of his success. In the case of Giles against 
Flagg. in which the question was which of the parties to 



the action had been elected Comptroller of this City, Mr. 
Tilden, as counsel for Mr. Flagg, went behind the returns, 
and by a most minute, painstaking and exhaustive process 
possessed himself of all the facts relating to the consti- 
tuency, the poll lists and the actual vote, and the statement 
to the jury of the results of this investigation, in his open- 
ing on behalf of his client, was, in itself an absolute and 
conclusive demonstration, and practically an end of the 
case. 

This is only a single illustration of his general and habit- 
ual methods. He believed in the potency of delinite facts as 
the best means of producing conviction in the minds of 
men, and would say that to this end he would rather have 
one fact than a column of rhetoric. But it was the facts 
underlying and out of sight, and undiscoverable, except by 
long and patient labor, which seemed specially to attract him 
and to furnish a kind of native stimulus to his keen percep- 
tions which he trained for service in the dark. This gave 
him a rare and in some respects unequalled power. To 
most men there are insuperable barriers of time and circum- 
stance and necessity which forbid their entering the laby- 
rinthine paths which he pursued in professional investiga- 
tion or in political forecast and combination, even if they 
have the genius to guide them in the unaccustomed way. 
Along with this resource of indefatigable research came a 
caution which was not timidity, but the master faculty 
which applies Lord Bacon's rule, and sees all dangers in 
council and none in action. He was, as he declared in one 
of his speeches during the great municipal crisis of 1871, 
"willing to follow where anyone would lead or to lead 
where anyone would follow," but if he was to have the re- 
sponsibility of leadership he would undertake no advance 
until he knew the ground to be occupied and could measure 
in the balance of his own judgment the forces of encounter 
and resistance. 

With all -these deliberative characteristics, and in spite 
of the lack of that physical robustness which by its in- 



stinctive force aids in bringing men to leadership, Mr. Tilden 
was bold as well as cautions, when he knew his ground. 
I recall an exploit of his at the Presidential election of 
1844, which had in it a certain dash and vigor which com- 
manded admiration. At that time, the election in Penn- 
sylvania ended before that in New York began. It was 
one of the political sayings of the time, "as goes Penn- 
sylvania, so goes the Union." Mr. Tilden formed and 
executed a plan for getting in Philadelphia at the last 
moment before the election in New York, the complete 
returns, so far as to be decisive of the result in Pennsyl- 
vania, and of bringing them to New York in time for pub- 
lication on the eve of the election in this State. At that 
time, before the era of the telegraph or the lightning 
express, this was no easy task. Mr. Tilden, however, 
organized his plan, went to Philadelphia, secured the re- 
turns which were unmistakeably favorable to his side, and 
brought them in the night, by a locomotive driven at the 
highest rate of speed, reaching New York in good time 
for publishing the desired intelligence, with the inspiring 
effect which such a prognostic of success could not fail to 
impart to the adherents of the cause for which he had 
done this special and hazardous service. 

It has been noted as a peculiarity of Mr. Tilden' s career, 
that he did not come to public office until late in life. 
With the exception of the post of Corporation Attorney of 
the City of New York, and his service in the Assembly of 
1845-6, and in the Constitutional Convention of 1846, he held 
no office until 1871, and followed his profession, according 
' to an elective method as to the cases he undertook, which 
would have been fatal to men of less ability. His clients 
must bide his time for examination and action, and he 
must have his own way of dealing with the cause. This 
made him less conversant with the Courts than with the 
consultation room, and yet, on occasion, as in the famous 
Burdell case, he was - found fully equipped for the active 
conflicts of the bar. It was only under the pressure of the 



great exigency which made plain the necessity of extra- 
ordinary remedies for unparalled public evils that he came 
to the front in official service. His forty years of prepara- 
tion gave him here unsurpassed advantages. He entered 
upon his strictly public life through the door of the j)ro- 
fession. The beginning of this Association may almost be 
said to have been the inauguration of his public career. 
The conspiracy by which the most important pu]:)lic trusts 
in municipal and judicial administration in this city were 
turned into instruments of corrupt private greed was 
thoroughly organized and the consjDirators were entrenched 
in the places of power. Mr. Tilden had refused retainers 
from men whose alliance with corrupt schemes and corrupt 
judges was notorious. They had said to him, "We don't 
want anybody else ; we want you." Against personal and 
partisan associates, he stood for honesty in administration 
and integrity on the Bench. At this critical moment the 
call was issued for the meeting at which this Association 
was formed. Those of our number who were present at 
that meeting at the Studio Building (Fifth Avenue and 
Twenty-sixth Street), on the evening of February 1, 1870, 
may recall the circumstances under which Mr. Tilden 
siDoke, quite late in the evening, and when as he was about 
quitting the room he was called back by general acclama- 
tion, and standing near the door made the most stirring 
speech of the hour, unpremeditated, as he afterwards said, 
but striking the keynote of the effective denunciation which 
aroused and quickened x>i^it)lic sentiment to the need of 
instant action. 

He said, " If the Bar is to become merely a mode of mak- 
ing money, making it in the most convenient way possible, 
but making it at all hazards, then the Bar is degi-aded. If 
the Bar is to be merely an institution that seeks to win 
causes, and win them by back door access to the judiciary, 
then it is not only degraded, but it is corrupt. * * * 

" The Bar, if it is to continue to exist, if it would restore 
itself to the dignity and honor which it once possessed. 



must be bold in aggression. If it will do its duty to itself, 
if it will do its duty to the i^rofession which, it follows, and 
to which it is devoted, the Bar can do everything else. It 
can have reformed constitutions, it can have a reformed 
judiciary, it can have the administration of Justice made 
pure and honorable, and can restore both the Judiciary and 
the Bar, until it shall be once more, as it formerly was, an 
honorable and elevated calling." 

Following upon this was the long contest with the Ring 
and its final overthrow, and the impeachment proceedings 
which arrested and put to an end the judicial malfeasance 
which had dishonored the Bench. The share of Mr. Tilden 
in this struggle is matter of history written in the records 
of our Association, of which he was one, and the first on the 
list, of its Vice-Presidents, elected February 15, 1870. His 
affidavit of October 24, 1871, disclosing the results of his 
personal investigation of the dealings through the Broad- 
way Bank of the members of the Board of Audit, brought 
their shameless transactions into as clear a light for judicial 
condemnation and sentence as his analysis of the Giles and 
Flagg vote had made that case easy of decision. At a per- 
sonal sacrifice, which he alone of the leading members of 
our body who united in this crusade against crime in high 
I)laces was able to make, he went to the Assembly to carry 
against organized opposition, and the desperate struggle of 
detected conspirators, the necessary measures of impeach- 
ment. Respecting this, we have the testimony of Mr. 
0' Conor, that it "was all Tilden' s work and no one's else. 
Tilden," he said, as reported by Mr. Bigelow, to whom the 
remark was made (with the addition that upon this point 
he was a competent witness), "went to the Legislature and 
forced the impeachment against every imaginable obstacle, 
open and covert, political and personal." 

On taking the chair at a meeting of our Association on 
May 28, 1872, at a time when apprehension as to the result 
was very generally felt, he declared that he did not share 
in those fears, and he gave a summary of the work already 



accom]3lislied, and of the cause of congratulation which ex- 
isted that while everything else in the way of reform had 
failed, this indispensible measure of impeachment had been 
adopted against " obstructions under every pretext'' which 
had to "be met at every step and overcome.'" 

The result justified his assurances. The purification of 
the Judiciary was accomplished by the eiforts of the Bar, 
Within these walls there can never be a question as to the 
singleness of j)urpose, the disinterestedness and the true 
professional zeal which marked the service of every one of 
our number who in private council or in public prosecution 
aided in the work. 

It is quite true that without an aroused public sentiment, 
without untiring and fearless activity on the part of the 
Press, without the constant co-operation and aid of public 
spirited citizens, the desired end could not have been se- 
cured ; but, as lawyers, w^e know that only the due pro- 
cesses of the law, put in motion and kept in motion by the 
most sagacious, vigilant and experienced ministers of the 
law, could bring to full exposure and to final judgment the 
wrongs and the wrong-doers. It is of little avail to attempt 
to measure the relative value of any one of the forces which 
conspired to accomplish the common purpose, or to ad- 
just with exactness the precise rewards of merit where so 
many gave their best endeavors, but in the retrospect, and 
in a just view, it is hard to overestimate the service which 
Mr. Tilden rendered in this crisis of our municipal and civic 
life, either as to its quality and degree of professional skill 
or its purity of purpose. 

I have given emphasis to this point of his career because 
it was its turning point, making him, by means of the pro- 
minence it gave him and the power he came to wield within 
his own political party and against powerful and organized 
opposition v^ithin its ranks, the most conspicuous and etfec- 
tive of its leaders. 

It gave him the fullest opportunity of putting into j)rac- 
tice and of insisting in public speech and in executive action 

10 



upon those ideas as to the administration of affairs which 
were, in his view, the supreme concern of citizenship. He 
was thoroughly imbued with the great principles of pop- 
ular government and with a keen sense of the evils which 
beset their practical exercise. 

Certainly no public man of our day was ever more thor- 
oughly furnished by natural or acquired aptitude to deal with 
those weighty problems and like the burdens of the old 
prophets they were his constant theme, whether men would 
hear or whether they would forbear. 

The same energy was conspicuous in his service as Gov- 
ernor. He initiated at once a war against the powerful com- 
bination which had made that branch of the public service 
which dealt with the Canal system of the State a central 
source of corruption. A secret scrutiny into the methods 
of the contractors, undertaken and carried on by his direc- 
tion, at his personal expense, disclosed the facts which his 
Canal message of 1875 spread before the Legislature and the 
People. The complete ascendency over the hostile forces 
which were ari'ayed against him as the result of this aggres- 
sive movement in the interest of reform and economy was 
gained by the same patient and indefatigable course of deal- 
ing which had already served him so well. Going behind 
the opposing Legislators and their immediate backers among 
the local constituencies they represented, he made his direct 
appeal to the individual voter and so effectually maintained 
his sujDremacy that his nomination for the Presidency was 
the necessary outcome of his established pre-eminence. 

Other incidents and details are foreign to my purpose 
and forbidden by the prescribed limits of this brief sketch. 
The fierce, unsparing warfare of a Presidential campaign, 
with its poisoned arrows, its mercenaries and its secret 
ser\dce of character assassination we may leave out of view 
as we look back over the professional life and the ser\dce in 
places honorably filled. The scars of a veteran soldier 
adorn, or disfigure, according to the medium of sympathy 
or aversion through which they are observed. The leader- 

11 



ship of a party is not a place in which to win the common 
suffrage of consenting approbation as to personal traits any 
more than the common suffrage as to public trusts. Success 
in attaining the highest place in the gift of the people might 
have given a wider field for the display of statesman- 
ship, tempered the criticism of rivals or opponents and 
heightened the admiration of friends, but failure, under 
circumstances which were in themselves an unexampled 
test and trial of character, was borne with an equanimity 
worthy of praise. 

" Alteram sortem bene prep aratum 
'' Pectus ." 

The mind prepared for either fortune, received the com- 
mendation of the Roman poet in his ode to an ill-fated friend 
who fell a victim to a political accusation. In the case of 
Mr. Tilden this temper was exhibited, without ostentation 
and without bitterness, and may well serve as a shield, were 
any needed, against detraction or disparagement. 

But whatever differences of political sentiment or affilia- 
tion may enter into our estimate of his character and work, 
it is a duty as well as a privilege within our own circle to 
assert his claim to the respect and gratitude of his brethren 
of the Bar and of the community at large, in those matters 
as to which w^e sx^eak what we know and testify w^hat we 
have seen. In the rush of events and esjDecially in the ever 
recurring struggles with present wi'ong-doing, public and 
private, we are too apt to be forgetful of i)ast dangers and 
past deliverances and of the work of those by whom the 
deliverances were wrought. It is in the retrospect of the 
great public peril which summoned Mr. Tilden to aid in the 
rescue of the State and of the peculiar service w^hicli he 
gave with unselfish and untiring fidelity and with full 
success, that we find as in a focus, the converging force and 
radiance of his best faculties and gifts ; a cheering and 
guiding light, unobscured and inextinguishable. 



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